|
|
|
|
|
|
by elektor
2513 days ago
|
|
|
Very cool! I signed up and will be looking out for surveys. Looking at the demographics, I noticed the survey panel is similar to that of Hacker News: white English speaking 20-30 year olds many who are in school. I'd love to hear about your efforts to have a more nationally/globally representative sample? |
|
|
Right now we’re available to participants in OECD countries and it’s probably going to be another while before we can expand globally. Within the 36 countries that we’re in, we’re currently trying to work out what incentives might work best: How can we encourage the average citizen to sign up and take part in online research? What about very hard-to-reach demographics like professionals?
We feel that cash generally works well as an incentive, but it’s not everything. A lot of the time people want to contribute to projects they personally care about. So on Prolific’s end, it will come down to matching projects with the right participants. Another type of incentive could be to offer to participants that Prolific donates their earnings to charities on their behalf, and perhaps Prolific could match their donation?
We’ve recently launched quota-based representative samples for the US and UK [1], where we stratify based on sex, ethnicity, and age. A by-product of this feature is that it specifically invites niche demographics to participate, helping fill gaps. We hope that having more surveys available for demographics that are in the minority (e.g. certain ethnicities and age groups) will improve our ability to recruit these participants (although there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here).
Another thing we’d like to do is launch a mobile app for participants, so anyone can take a quick survey on the go (while waiting in line, chilling at home, commuting). Making our surveys more accessible to participants through different channels should help represent more people in society.
And then there’s user experience. We’re working on making our site as self-explanatory as possible, so anybody can sign up and start participating, even if you’re someone who doesn’t spend much time on the internet.
What do you think––what might be other ways to diversify our participant pool? Very curious
[1] https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-gb/articles/360019...